Assemble set to create timber “forest” to celebrate designer Robin Day

Design collective Assemble is set to create an installation at the V&A to mark the centenary of the birth of British furniture designer Robin Day, as part of the London Design Festival.

Titled Robin Day Works in Wood, the installation will be a “forest” of timber columns as a nod to Day’s childhood growing up near the woodlands of High Wycombe and his explorations in moulded plywood later in life. Best known for his injection-moulded Polypropylene chair, the piece will sit as part of an exhibition about the 20th Century designer’s almost 70-year career.

Jane Withers, curator of the exhibition says: “[the piece] highlights how [Day] turned wood into an expressive modern material but also his profound attachment to nature as a source of inspiration as well as raw material.”

“The influence of this is in everything,” says Peter Saville gesturing at his sleeve designs for Factory Records, alongside a wealth of work inspired by Joy Division and New Order. “It transcends music completely. It’s in every gallery you go to, it’s in every fashion collection, the influence of this,” he says again looking around him, “has spread through everything.”

Memphis Group artist Nathalie du Pasquier has opened a new show, From time to time, at Pace Gallery, London. The exhibition is the artist’s first solo show in the UK for almost 25 years, spanning sculpture, painting and drawing in over 50 mostly new works.

Rarely does anything date faster than our visions of the future, from the flying cars and under the sea croquet parties of the En L’an 2000 cigarette cards; to the need to ‘retire’ bio-engineered replicants who travel to Earth illegally and assimilate to 2019 Los Angeles, as proposed by Ridley Scott’s 1982 film, Bladerunner – although this isn’t necessarily so far from our reality of fake science propelled by GOOP-y ‘lifestylers’ and Trump-ed up news.

Artist Conrad Shawcross’ sculptural works often blur the lines between geometry and philosophy, physics and metaphysics, and he uses science and rationale to create mind-bending objects that look other-worldly. “I studied maths and physics at school and I was at university studying art, but I was always surrounded by other subjects. I spent a lot of my youth in the Science Museum, every month I’d go there and look at the maths department,” Conrad says of where his approach stems from. “I just really love objects that seem to be rational but then they contain a lot of irrationality. They have a cloak of the rational mind which has conceived and constructed them, but beyond that they are misguided.”

As African culture is increasingly disseminated across Instagram and through the pages of Western fashion magazines, an exhibition celebrating Nigerian beauty and identity opens in-store at Kenzo Mayfair. Gidi Gidi Bu Ugwu Ze, Unity is Strength fuses the creative talent of three of London’s most promising creatives, filmmaker Akinola Davies, photographer Ruth Ossai and stylist Ibrahim Kamara. We caught up with the trio on the morning of the film’s launch as they prepare for the exhibition’s opening this evening.